Plans to overhaul to children's services could see fewer taken into care

Councillors discussed how the move could help children and young people, as well as what could go wrong.

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Cambridgeshire County Council is considering implementing transformational changes to its children’s services, adopting a similar “hub” style model used in North Yorkshire County Council’s No Wrong Door scheme.

Cllr Steve Count said: “There is a new way of working out there we can learn from. We can get a better outcome for children and young people.”

The model aims to provide young people who are experiencing family breakdown, those looked after, and those leaving care, with flexible accommodation and support from a single multi-agency team.

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The team comprises residential staff, outreach workers, clinical staff, speech and language therapists, police officers and support from drug and alcohol services, youth offending services, supported accommodation provision and housing providers. Key to the model is a shared management structure, training and a shared understanding of the model's culture and vision.

The move was discussed at the council's general purposes committee last week. Some councillors raised concerns about the transformational changes, with questions raised over how a hub model, as well as a push to keep young people and children with their families rather than in foster care, would affect children.

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Cllr John Hipkin said: “I see that one of the proud claims of the report is that one of the measures of success is the number of children who stay with their families.

“I am an old Dr Barnardos boy, I have been kicked around from place to place as a boy and I wonder whether keeping children in families that are precisely the source of some of the problems is constructive.

“Unhappily, a great deal of the problems young people experience come from the families they are born into. The idea there is something transcendentally sacred about the family is a dangerous form of thinking.

“I wonder whether we will soon find children have stayed with dangerous families when they should have been removed.”